Tag Archives: personalization

I’ve been planning my schedule for the DA Hub in late September and while I find it frustrating (so much interesting stuff!), it’s also enlightening about where digital analytics is right now and where it’s headed. Every conference is a kind of mirror to its industry, of course, but that reflection is often distorted by the needs of the conference – to focus on the cutting-edge, to sell sponsorships, to encourage product adoption, etc. With DA Hub, the Conference agenda is set by the enterprise practitioners who are leading groups – and it’s what they want to talk about. That makes the conference agenda unusually broad and, it seems to me, uniquely reflective of the state of our industry (at least at the big enterprise level).

So here’s a guided tour of my DA Hub – including what I thought was most interesting, what I choose, and why. At the end I hope that, like Indiana Jones picking the Holy Grail from a murderers row of drinking vessels, I chose wisely.

Session 1 features conversations on Video Tracking, Data Lakes, the Lifecycle of an Analyst, Building Analytics Community, Sexy Dashboards (surely an oxymoron), Innovation, the Agile Enterprise and Personalization. Fortunately, while I’d love to join both Twitch’s June Dershewitz to talk about Data Lakes and Data Swamps or Intuit’s Dylan Lewis for When Harry (Personalization) met Sally (Experimentation), I didn’t have to agonize at all, since I’m scheduled to lead a conversation on Machine Learning in Digital Analtyics. Still, it’s an incredible set of choices and represents just how much breadth there is to digital analytics practice these days.

Session 2 doesn’t make things easier. With topics ranging across Women in Analytics, Personalization, Data Science, IoT, Data Governance, Digital Product Management, Campaign Measurement, Rolling Your Own Technology, and Voice of Customer…Dang. Women in Analytics gets knocked off my list. I’ll eliminate Campaign Measurement even though I’d love to chat with Chip Strieff from Adidas about campaign optimization. I did Tom Bett’s (Financial Times) conversation on rolling your own technology in Europe this year – so I guess I can sacrifice that. Normally I’d cross the data governance session off my list. But not only am I managing some aspects of a data governance process for a client right now, I’ve known Verizon’s Rene Villa for a long time and had some truly fantastic conversations with him. So I’m tempted. On the other hand, retail personalization is of huge interest to me. So talking over personalization with Gautam Madiman from Lowe’s would be a real treat. And did I mention that I’ve become very, very interested in certain forms of IoT tracking? Getting a chance to talk with Vivint’s Brandon Bunker around that would be pretty cool. And, of course, I’ve spent years trying to do more with VoC and hearing Abercrombie & Fitch’s story with Sasha Verbitsky would be sweet. Provisionally, I’m picking IoT. I just don’t get a chance to talk IoT very much and I can’t pass up the opportunity. But personalization might drag me back in.

In the next session I have to choose between Dashboarding (the wretched state of as opposed to the sexiness of), Data Mining Methods, Martech, Next Generation Analytics, Analytics Coaching, Measuring Content Success, Leveraging Tag Management and Using Marketing Couds for Personalization. The choice is a little easier because I did Kyle Keller’s (Vox) conversation on Dashboarding two years ago in Europe. And while that session was probably the most contentious DA Hub group I’ve ever been in (and yes, it was my fault but it was also pretty productive and interesting), I can probably move on. I’m not that involved with tag management these days – a sign that it must be mature – so that’s off my list too. I’m very intrigued by Akhil Anumolu’s (Delta Airlines) session on Can Developers be Marketers? The Emerging Role of MarTech. As a washed-up developer, I still find myself believing that developers are extraordinarily useful people and vastly under-utilized in today’s enterprise. I’m also tempted by my friend David McBride’s session on Next Generation Analytics. Not only because David is one of the most enjoyable people that I’ve ever met to talk with, but because driving analytics forward is, really, my job. But I’m probably going to go with David William’s session on Marketing Clouds. David is brilliant and ASOS is truly cutting edge (they are a giant in the UK and global in reach but not as well known here), and this also happens to be an area where I’m personally involved in steering some client projects. David’s topical focus on single-vendor stacks to deliver personalization is incredibly timely for me.

Next up we have Millennials in the Analytics Workforce, Streaming Video Metrics, Breaking the Analytics Glass Ceiling, Experimentation on Steroids, Data Journalism, Distributed Social Media Platforms, Customer Experience Management, Ethics in Analytics(!), and Customer Segmentation. There are several choices in here that I’d be pretty thrilled with: Dylan’s session on Experimentation, Chip’s session on CEM and, of course, Shari Cleary’s (Viacom) session on Segmentation. After all, segmentation is, like, my favorite thing in the world. But I’m probably going to go with Lynn Lanphier’s (Best Buy) session on Data Journalism. I have more to learn in that space, and it’s an area of analytics I’ve never felt that my practice has delivered on as well as we should.

In the last session, I could choose from more on Customer Experience Management, Driving Analytics to the C-Suite, Optimizing Analytics Career-Oaths, Creating High-Impact Analytics Programs, Building Analytics Teams, Delivering Digital Products, Calculating Analytics Impact, and Moving from Report Monkey to Analytics Advisor. But I don’t get to choose. Because this is where my second session (on driving Enterprise Digital Transformation) resides. I wrote about doing this session in the EU early this summer – it was one of the best conversations around analytics I’ve had the pleasure of being part of. I’m just hoping this session can capture some of that magic. If I didn’t have hosting duties, I think I might gravitate toward Theresa Locklear’s (NFL) conversation on Return on Analytics. When we help our clients create new analytics and digital transformation strategies, we have to help them justify what always amount to significant new expenditures. So much of analytics is exploratory and foundational, however, that we don’t always have great answers about the real return. I’d love to be able to share thoughts on how to think (and talk) about analytics ROI in a more compelling fashion.

All great stuff.

We work in such a fascinating field with so many components to it. We can specialize in data science and analytics method, take care of the fundamental challenges around building data foundations, drive customer communications and personalization, help the enterprise understand and measure it’s performance, optimize relentlessly in and across channels, or try to put all these pieces together and manage the teams and people that come with that. I love that at a Conference like the Hub I get a chance to share knowledge with (very) like-minded folks and participate in conversations where I know I’m truly expert (like segmentation or analytics transformation), areas where I’d like to do better (like Data Journalism), and areas where we’re all pushing the outside of the envelope (IoT and Machine Learning) together. Seems like a wonderful trade-off all the way around.

In my last post I described a set of analytics projects that drive real competitive advantage in retail and eCommerce. These projects are meant to be the opening of the third and final stage of an analytically driven digital transformation. They are big, complex, important projects that make a real difference to the way the business works.

But I know folks outside retail (and they’re the majority of my client-base) get frustrated because so much of the analytics technology and conversation seems to reflect retail concerns. So in this post, I wanted to describe an alternative set of projects specifically for another industry (I picked Hospitality) and talk a little bit about some of the key analytics flashpoints in different industries. Every business is unique. There is no one right set of projects when you get to this phase of digital transformation, but there are analytics projects that are quite important to almost everyone in a given industry.

Here’s a fairly generic set of projects I’d typically attach to a presentation on digital transformation in hospitality. You can see that about half the projects are the same as what I recommended for retail.

Aggressive personalization is a core part of MOST good digital programs – almost regardless of industry. If you’re in health-care, financial services, retail, travel & hospitality, government or technology, then analytics-driven personalization should be a high priority. It’s actually a lot easier to say where personalization might not be near the top of the list: CPG and maybe manufacturing. In CPG, many web sites are too shallow and lack enough interesting content to make personalization effective. In fact, the Website itself is often pretty unimportant. CPG folks should probably be more worried about their marketing and social media analytics than personalization. Manufacturers might be on the same level, but a lot depends on the type of industry, how many products you have, how many audiences, and how much content. In every case, the more you have (product, audience, content), the more likely it is that personalization should be a strategic priority.

I also included Surprise-based Loyalty. Travel is actually the sector where I first developed these concepts. You can read a somewhat more detailed explanation in an article I recently published in the CIO Outlook for Travel & Hospitality. But there are quite a few reasons why hospitality, in particular, is a great place to build a surprise-based program. First, the hospitality industry has numerous opportunities to deliver surprise-based loyalty at little or no cost. That’s critical. Hospitality also has the requisite data to allow for powerful analytic targeting and has sufficient touches to make the concept powerful and workable. What’s more, most of the rewards programs in hospitality suffer from scale. Sure, a few global giants have the reach to make a traditional loyalty program appealing. But if you’re a boutique or mid-tier chain, your traditional loyalty program will never look particularly attractive. Surprise-based concepts get around all that. With no fixed cost, the ability to target and grow them organically, and real impact on loyalty, they deliver a fundamentally different kind of experience that doesn’t depend on scale and global reach.

My third project is another one that could appear almost everywhere: mobile optimization. For Hospitality, it’s particularly important to create a great mobile on-property experience and build out the mobile experience as the Hub for loyalty. Integration of mobile digital experiences with property systems enables a whole array of real experience difference makers – room selection, automatic upgrading, room bidding, expedited check-in, door control, service requests and, of course, plenty of surprise (and traditional) loyalty opportunities.

Why didn’t this show up in retail? Hey, it could. It might be sixth on my generic list. But many of the retailers I’m working with are struggling to figure out how to make mobile an important part of the experience. With all the beaconing and wifi we’ve seen, most opt-in systems simply don’t get enough adoption to make them worthwhile. I think it’s easier to drive adoption in hospitality. And adoption is critical to driving serious advantage.

When I talk about advanced Revenue Management I’m clearly hovering somewhere on the edge of what might reasonably be considered digital. There are lots of different ways to improve revenue management, but what I have in mind here are two specific types of analysis. The first is using digital view volume to feed demand signals into revenue management. This is a simple but effective technique for taking advantage of your digital data to improve your price planning. I also believe that in the zero-sum game that is room (and flight) planning, there are opportunities to use digital data collection from OTAs to reverse engineer competitor pricing strategies and then optimize your price curve to take advantage of that knowledge.

In retail, I talked about the growing importance of electronic signage and integrated digital experiences and optimizing the measurement of those (largely unmeasured) systems. In Hospitality, I’ve picked something that isn’t quite the same but falls in the same omni-channel category – optimizing the integration of on-property with digital. This cuts in both directions and overlaps with the analytics around mobile (obviously), personalization (obviously), surprise-loyalty (obviously) and revenue management. Revenue Management a little less obviously but most revenue management systems use time-based pricing not customer based pricing – often completely missing differentials in customer value from on-property behavior. Casino’s, of course, are the exception to this.

For resort properties, there are significant opportunities to integrate digital view behavior into on-property drives. But for almost every type of property there are ways to make the on-property experience better. Some of this is ridiculously easy. When I log into my hotel wifi, I almost always get the standard property page. No customization. No personalization. But I’m a heavy consumer of certain types of on-property experiences including some highly-profitable ones like late-night room service dinners. Do I ever get a dinner drive? A special offer? A loyalty treat? Nope. Pretty much never.

I put this digital/on-property integration high on the list mostly because when it comes to hospitality, the on-property experience is THE critical factor. I might love or hate the Website or even the App, but both are just little bumps on the great big behind that is the actual stay. If I can help make the stay experience better with digital, I’ve done something important.

So my top five projects for hospitality are:

Personalization

Surprise-based Loyalty

Digital Additions to Revenue Management

Mobile Experience and Loyalty Optimization

On-Property digital integration

As with retail, none are easy. Most involve complex integrations AND deep analytics to work well. But they form a powerful and powerfully related nexus of programs that drive real competitive advantage.

Of course, as I’ve tried to make clear, the selection of a top-five is utterly arbitrary. Every business will have its unique strategic priorities, market position, and brand. Those things matter. What’s more, the third phase of an analytics transformation is open-ended. There aren’t just five things. You don’t stop when (if ever) you’ve done these projects.

So it’s natural to ask what are some other commonly important projects that didn’t make the list (and weren’t already captured in the earlier two phases). Here, with some notes about industries, are some more things to chew on:

Digital Acquisition Optimization (Campaign-level): I’ve already covered both a campaign measurement framework and Mix/Attribution in the first two phases. But I haven’t been quite true to myself since I often tell clients to worry about optimizing your individual channels and campaigns first before you worry about attribution. There are more powerful analytic techniques for campaign-specific optimization than attribution – and many, many enterprises would be well-advised focus on those techniques as part of their overall digital transformation. I won’t say that every digital media buy I see sucks. But a lot do. This one isn’t specific to industry; it’s important to anyone dropping significant dime on digital marketing.

Right-Channeling Support: This analytics project often makes my top-five list in financial services, technology, and health care (but it’s important in a lot of other places too). Not only is the call-center a significant cost for many an enterprise, it’s almost always a significant driver of churn and bad experience. That’s not always because call-centers are bad – it’s hard to do well. And these days, many people (I’m certainly in this bucket) flat out prefer digital servicing in most use-cases. So digital servicing is a big deal and it’s deeply analytic. Bridging digital and call is a huge analytics opportunity and one of the most important projects you can take in a digital transformation.

Digital Sales Support: If a field-sales force is a core part of your business, then digital analytics to support what they do is often in my top-five projects around transformation. Technology, Pharma, and certain areas of Financial Services (like Insurance and Wealth) all need to figure out how their digital assets play with their field sales force. Siloed approaches here are worse than silos in digital marketing attribution. You can NOT do this well unless you tackle it as an integrated effort with consistent measurement across the journey.

Content Attribution: When I was at the Digital Analytics Hub in Europe one of the most interesting parts of the discussion around transformation focused on the need for traditional companies to become, in effect, media companies. There’s nothing terribly original about this idea (not sure who’s it is), but it is terribly important and often it’s a huge stumbling block when it comes to transformation. Companies don’t build nearly enough content to be good at digital and they don’t measure it appropriately. Learning how to measure the content experience and how to take advantage of content are keys to effective digital transformation and anyone focused on building deeper sales cycles should think carefully about making content attribution a prominent part of their initial analytics plan.

Balancing Success: One of the biggest failure points in digital transformation in my client-base involves situations where a digital property has several very important enterprise functions. Selling and generating leads, advertising and engagement, linear vs. direct consumption, building brands vs. generating revenue. These are all common examples. The problem is that most enterprises are wishy-washy when it comes to balancing these objectives. When I ask senior folks what they really want (or when I look at how people are measured), what I usually hear is both. That’s not helpful. There are analytic approaches to measuring the trade-offs in site real-estate and marketing between driving to multiple types of success. If you haven’t done the analytics work to figure this out and set appropriate incentives and performance measurements, you’re simply not going to be good at all – and perhaps any – of your core functions.

Well, I could go on of course. But I’m almost at four pages now – which I know is excessive. There are a lot of options. That’s why creating a strategic plan for analytics transformation isn’t trivial and it isn’t boilerplate. But as I pointed out in my introduction to the last post, this is the fun stuff.

In my next post, I hope to tackle those organizational issues I’ve been deferring for so long – but I may have one or two more detours up my sleeve!

In my last posts before the DA Hub, I described the first two parts of an analytics driven digital transformation. The first part covered the foundational activities that help an organization understand digital and think and decide about it intelligently. Things like customer journey, 2-tiered segmentation, a comprehensive VoC system and a unified campaign measurement framework form the core of a great digital organization. Done well, they will transform the way your organization thinks about digital. But, of course, thinking isn’t enough. You don’t build culture by talking but by doing. In the beginning was the deed. That’s why my second post dealt with a whole set of techniques for making analytics a constant part of the organization’s processes. Experimentation driven by a comprehensive analytics-driven testing plan, attribution and mix modelling, analytic reporting, re-survey, and a regular cadence of analytics driven briefings make continuous improvement a reality. If you take this seriously and execute fully on these first two phases, you will be good at digital. That’s a promise.

But as powerful, transformative and important as these first two phases are, they still represent only a fraction of what you can achieve with analytics driven-transformation. The third phase of analytics driven transformation targets areas where analytics changes the way a business operates, prices its products, communicates with and supports its customers.

The third phase of digital transformation is unique. In some ways, it’s easier than the first two phases. It involves much less organization and cultural transformation. If you done those first two phases, you’re already there when it comes to having an analytics culture. On the other hand, in this third phase the analytics projects themselves are often MUCH more complex. This is where we tackle big hard problems. Problems that require big data, advanced statistical analysis, and serious imagination. Well, that’s the fun stuff. Seriously, if you’ve gotten through the first two phases of an analytics transformation successfully, doing the projects in Phase Three is like a taking a victory lap.

There isn’t one single blueprint for the third phase of an analytics driven transformation. The work that gets done in the first two phases is surprisingly similar almost regardless of the industry or specific business. I suppose it’s like laying the foundation for a building. No matter what the building looks like, the concrete block at the bottom is going to look pretty much the same. At this third level, however, we’re above the foundation and what you do will depend mightily on your specific business.

I know that it depends on your business is not much of an answer. As a consultant, it’s not unusual to get caught up in conversations like this:

“So how much would it cost?”

“Well, that depends.”

“What kind of things does it depend on?”

“Well, it depends on how deeply you want to go into it, who you want to have do it, and how you want to get it done.”

All of this is true, of course, but none of it is helpful. I usually try to short-circuit these conversations by presenting a couple of real world alternatives.

I think this is more helpful (though it’s also more dangerous). Similarly, when I present the third phase of an analytics driven transformation I try to make it specific to the business in question. And the more I know about the business, the more pointed, interesting, and – I hope – convincing that third phase is going to look. But if I haven’t spent much time a business, I still customize that third phase by industry – picking out high-level analytics projects that are broadly applicable to everyone in the sector.

That’s what I’m going to try to do here, with the added benefit of picking a couple different industries and showing how the differences play out in this third phase. Do keep in mind, though, that the description of this third phase – unlike that of the first two – is meant to be suggestive only. No real-world third phase (certainly no optimal one) is likely to mirror what I lay out here. It might not even be very close. What’s more, unlike the first phase (at least) which is close-ended (when you’ve done the projects I suggest you’re done with that phase), phase three is open-ended. You never stop doing analytics projects at this level. And that’s a good thing.

For the first example, I decided to start with a classic retail e-commerce view of the world. It’s a sector where we all have, at the very least, a consumer’s understanding of how it works. There are many, many possible projects to choose from, but here are five I often present as a typical starting point.

The first is an analytically driven personalization program. With journey-mapping, 2-tiered segmentation and a robust experimentation program, an enterprise should be a in a good position to drive personalization. Most personalization programs bootstrap themselves by starting with fairly straightforward segmentations (already done) and rule-based personalization decisions targeted to “easy” problems like email offers and returning visitors to the Website. That’s fine. The very best way to build a personalization program is organically – build it by doing it with increasing sophistication in more and more channels and at more and more touchpoints.

Merchandising optimization is another very big opportunity. So much of the merchandising optimization I see is focused on product detail pages. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it misses the much larger opportunity to optimize merchandising on search and aisle pages via analytics. Traditional merchandising folks have been slow to understand how critical moving merchandising upstream is to effective digital performance. This turns out to be analytically both very challenging and very rich.

Assortment optimization (and I might be just as likely to pick pricing or demand signals here) has long been a domain of traditional retail analytics. As such, I have to admit I didn’t think much about it until the last few years. But I’ve come to believe that digital analytics can yield powerful preference information that is typically missing in this analysis. To do effective assortment optimization, you need to understand customer’s potential replacement options. In the offline world, this usually involves making simple guesses based on high-level product sales about which products will be substituted. Using online view data, we can do much, much better. This is a case where digital analytics doesn’t so much replace an existing technique as deepen and enrich it with data heretofore undreamed of. Assortment optimization with digital data gives you highly segmented, localized data about product substitution preferences. It’s a lot better.

I’ve become a strong advocated for a fundamental re-think of loyalty programs based on the idea that surprise-based loyalty with no formal earning system is the future of rewards programs. The advantages of surprise-based loyalty are considerable when stacked up against traditional loyalty programs. You can target rewards where you think they will create lift. You can take advantage of inventory problems or opportunities. You don’t incur ANY financial obligations. You create no customer resentment or class issues. You can scale them and localize them to work with a specially trained staff. And, of course, the biggest bonus of all – you actually create far more impact per dollar spent. Surprise-based loyalty is, inherently, analytic. You can’t really do it any other way. Where it’s an option, it’s always one of the biggest changes you can make in the way your business works.

Finally, I’ve picked digital/store integration as my fifth project for analytics-led transformation. There are a number of different ways to take this. The drives between store and site are complex, important and fruitful. Optimizing those drives should be one of the analytics priorities for any omni-channel retail. And that optimization is a combination of testing and analytics. In this case, however, I’ve chosen to focus on measuring and optimizing digital in-store experiences. You’re surely familiar with endless-aisle retail; where digital is integrated into the in-store experience. The vast majority of these physical-digital experiences have been quite ineffective. Almost always, they’ve been executed from a retail perspective. By which I mean that they’ve been built once, dropped into the store, and left to fail. That’s just not doing it right. In-store experiences are getting more digital. Digital signage is growing rapidly. Physical-digital experiences are increasingly common. But if you want actual competitive advantage out of these experiences, you’d better tackle them from a digital test-and-learn/analytics perspective. Anything less is a prescription for failure.

So here’s my first round of Phase Three projects for an analytics driven transformation in retail. Each is big, complex and hard. They are also important. These are the projects that will truly transform your digital business. They are rubber-meets-the-road stuff that drive competitive advantage. It would be a mistake to try and execute on projects like this without first creating a strong analytics foundation in the organization. You’re chances of misfiring on doing or operationalizing the analytics are simply too great without that foundation. But if you don’t move past the first two phases into analytics like this, you’re missing the big stuff. You can churn out lots of incremental improvement in digital without ever touching projects like these. Those incremental improvements aren’t nothing. They may be valuable enough to justify your time and money. But if that’s all you ever do, you’ll likely find yourself wondering if it was all really worth it. Do any of these projects successfully, and you’ll never ask that question again.

Next week I’ll show a different (non-retail) set of projects and break-down what the differences tell us about how to make analytics a strategic asset.

For most of this year I’ve been writing an extended series on digital transformation in the enterprise. Along the way, I’ve described why organizations (particularly large ones) struggle with digital, the core capabilities necessary to do digital well, and ways in which organizations can build a better, more analytic culture. I’ve even put together a series of videos that describe how enterprises are currently driving digital and how they can do better.

I think both the current-state (what we do wrong) and the end-state (doing digital right) are compelling. In the next few posts, I’m going to wrap this series up with a discussion around how you get from here to there.

I don’t suppose anyone thinks the journey from here to there is trivial. Doing digital the way I’ve described it (see the Agile Organization) involves some pretty fundamental change: change to the way enterprises budget, change to the way they organize, and change to the way they do digital at almost every level. It also involves, and this is totally unsurprising, investments in people and technology and more than a dollop of patience. It would actually be much easier to build a good digital organization from scratch than to adapt the pieces that exist in the typical enterprise.

Change is harder than creation. It has more friction and more fail points. But change is the reality for most enterprise.

So where do you start and how do you go about building a great digital organization?

I’m going to answer that question here from an analytics perspective. That’s the easy part. Once I’ve worked through the steps in building analytics maturity and digital decisioning, I’ll tackle the organizational component, wherein I expect to hazard a series of guesses, speculation and unlikely theory to paper over the fact that almost no one has done this transformation successfully and every organization has fundamentally unique structures and people that make its dynamics deeply specific.

The foundation of any analytics program is, of course, data. One of the most satisfying developments in digital analytics in the past 3-5 years has been the dramatic improvement in the state of data collection. It used to be that EVERY engagement we undertook began with a plodding slog through data auditing and clean-up. These days, that’s more the exception than the rule. Still, there are plenty of exceptions. So the first step in just about any analytics effort is to make sure the data foundation is solid. There’s a second aspect to this that’s worth pointing out. For a lot of my clients, basic data collection is no longer much of an issue. But even where that’s true, there are often significant gaps in digital analytics data collection for personalization. So many Adobe designs are predicated on meeting reporting requirements that it’s not at all unusual for key personalization elements like filtering selections, image expansions, sorting behaviors and DHTML exposures to go largely untracked. That’s true on both the Web and Mobile sides. Part of auditing your data collection should be a careful look at whether your capturing all the personalization cues you could – and that’s often a critical foundational element for the steps to follow.

Right along with auditing your data collection comes building a comprehensive customer journey framework. I’ve added the word “framework” here not to be all “consulty” but to emphasize that a customer journey isn’t built once as a static map. That’s the old way – and it’s wrong in every respect (so be careful what you buy). It’s wrong because it’s not segmented. It’s wrong because it’s too high-level. And most of all it’s wrong because it’s too static. So while a customer journey framework is more a capability and a process than a “thing”, it’s also true that you have to start somewhere. Getting that initial segmented journey map in place provides the high-level strategic framework for your digital strategy and for your analytics and testing. It’s the key strategic piece welding your operational capabilities to your strategic vision.

My third foundational building block is (Chorus sings refrain) “2-Tiered segmentation”. I’ve written voluminously on digital segmentation and how it works, so I won’t add much more here. But if journey mapping is the piece linking your strategic vision to your operational capabilities, 2-tiered segmentation is the equivalent piece linking at the tactical level. At every touchpoint in a customer journey there is the need to understand who somebody is and where in their journey they are. That’s what 2-tiered segmentation provides.

Auditing your data, creating a journey mapping and tying that to a digital segmentation are truly foundational. They are all “you can’t get there from here without going through these” kind of activities. Almost every significant report, analysis and decision that you make will rely on these three activities.

That’s not really true for my next two foundational activities. I chose building an integrated voice of customer (VoC) capability as my fourth key building block. If you’ve read my book, you know that one of the main uses for a VoC program is to refine and tune your journey map and segmentation. So in one sense, this capability may be prior to either of those. But you can do enough VoC to support those two activities without really building a full VoC program. And what I have in mind here is a full program. What do I mean by a full program? I mean an enterprise feedback management system that makes it easy to deploy surveys at any point in the journey across any device. I mean a set of organizational processes that ideate, design, deploy, interpret and socialize VoC information constantly. I mean an enterprise-wide reporting capability that integrates different VoC sources, classifies them, tracks them, and provides drill-down (and that’s important because VoC data is virtually useless without cross-tabulation) access to them across the organization. I also mean a culture where one of the natural and immediate parts of making a decision is looking at what customer’s think and – if that isn’t available – launching a survey to figure it out. I put VoC as part of this foundational set because I think it’s one of the easiest ways to deliver real wins to the organization. I also like the idea of driving a combination of tactical (data, segmentation) and strategic (journey, VoC) initiatives in your early phases. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, we analytics folks tend to over-focus on the tactical.

Finally, I’ve included building a campaign measurement framework into the initial set of foundational activities. This might not be the right choice for every organization, but if you spend a significant amount of money on marketing, it’s a critical element in evolving your maturity. Like data audits, a lot of my clients are already pretty good at this. For many folks, campaigns are already measured using a pretty rich and well-thought out framework and the pain point tends to be deeper – around attribution and mix. But I also see organizations jumping right to questions of attribution before they’ve really done the work necessary to pick the right KPIs to optimize against. That’s a prescription for disaster. If you don’t put in the intellectual sweat equity to understand how campaigns should be measured (and it’s often surprisingly complicated in real-world businesses where conversion rate is rarely the be-all-and-end-all of optimization), then your attribution modelling is doomed to fail.

So here’s the first five things to tackle in building out the analytics part of a digital transformation effort:

These five activities provide a rich foundation for analytics driven transformation along with some core strategic analytic capabilities. I’ll cover what comes after this in my next post.

Targeted VoC is a powerful (and totally neglected) tool for personalization. Facebook’s experience is entirely relevant to ANY content producer. I don’t know if I can take credit for this, but I suggested this to folks at Facebook a couple of years back!

An interesting discussion of the problems in identifying “likely” voters and the benefits of behavioral data integration. Food for thought in the enterprise world as well where the equivalent is often possible but rarely done.

People have struggled with this (big) data provider model but Factual feels like it’s found a real (and valuable) niche. Would love to see more of this grow since external data is a huge miss in most big data systems.

Targeted VoC is a powerful (and totally neglected) tool for personalization. Facebook’s experience is entirely relevant to ANY content producer. I don’t know if I can take credit for this, but I suggested this to folks at Facebook a couple of years back!

An interesting discussion of the problems in identifying “likely” voters and the benefits of behavioral data integration. Food for thought in the enterprise world as well where the equivalent is often possible but rarely done.